This month marks two years since the environmental catastrophe known to the world as the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. A British Petroleum (BP) oil rig off the coast of Louisiana exploded, killing 11 oil rig workers and expelling 25 000 barrels of oil, and over the following three months 4.9 million barrels of oil, into the Gulf of Mexico. The scale of the disaster has become known through the work of independent teams of scientists, environmental activists, Native American and immigrant groups that have monitored the scope and impact of the catastrophe on the environment and the economy of the Gulf of Mexico states.

What is scandalous is the way in which BP executives, oil industry corporate managers, US politicians and government regulatory agencies minimised the extent of the disaster, and failed to provide adequate protection for the affected communities. Until today, not a single BP executive has been held responsible for the oil spill, and all the while the BP corporation continues to rake in billions of dollars in profits.

The Socialist Worker newspaper published a book review of Black Tide: The devastating impact of the Gulf Oil spill by Antonia Juhasz. Not only should we remember the terrible impact of this disaster on the lives and economic wellbeing of the afflicted communities, but we should bear in mind that BP continues to push for further offshore oil drilling projects, all with the active permission of the Obama administration. Rather than advocate for compensation for the victims of the spill, and demand a review of the dangerous practices that led to this disaster, the Obama administration has consistently sided with the oil multinational in reducing the ability of plaintiffs to sue for compensation, and allow further offshore oil drilling. The ecologically lethal practices of the BP corporation have not been changed.

The book review by the Socialist Worker contains a number of insights into the way that safety and environmental standards were compromised in the lead-up to the oil spill. One fascinating episode concerns the actions of the rig’s captain towards Andrea Fleytas. The latter, was on the crew when the explosion occurred. Realising that something drastic had happened, the article continues with Juhasz’s words:

It was Fleytas, one of three women on the crew, who manually set off the ship’s general alarm at 9:47 p.m. when the automatic alarms failed to signal that combustible gas had entered parts of the rig where crews were working…

It was Fleytas who…four minutes after the explosions–with power out, communication out, engines down, fires throughout the rig, and men throwing themselves overboard–noticed that no one had sent a distress signal to the outside world.

For her courage in the face of danger, Fleytas was officially reprimanded by the rig’s captain.

The incestuous relationship between corporate power and the media monopolies was in full evidence in the days after the disaster. The mainstream corporate media dutifully accepted all the assurances and conservative diagnoses of the BP multinational giant. As the full scale of the disaster and its aftermath became obvious, the Obama administration moved to insulate BP and its executives from further damage and litigation. Over the objections of scientists, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used a toxic chemical dispersant to control the oil spill, only aggravating the environmental damage.

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the subsequent behaviour of the US political system, demonstrates that the capitalist system, driven by profit maximisation and the accumulation of untold wealth by a tiny financial elite, is incompatible with ecological sustainability and community needs. The financial power of the large multinational corporations and banks must be confronted to resolve the ecological and humanitarian needs of the wider society.

Go read the whole article.

The current US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, speaking to the US Senate Appropriations Committee in February 2012, stated that the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad meets the criteria of a war criminal. The   Telegraph newspaper in Britain reported as follows:

“Based on definitions of war criminal and crimes against humanity, there would be an argument to be made that he would fit into that category,” she said in Washington.

“But I also think that from long experience that can complicate a resolution of a difficult, complex situation because it limits options to persuade leaders perhaps to step down from power.”

This raises a number of interesting questions regarding the application of international law to heads of state and corresponding government officials. What constitutes war crimes, and how can we evaluate whether or not a state leader is a war criminal?

Nuremberg and war crimes

Definitions of war crimes date from the end of World War Two. The charter that established the framework for the Nuremberg war crime trials of Nazi leaders has also been incorporated into today’s International Criminal Court. The charter of the International Military Tribunal defined war crimes defined the following as war crimes in Article 6:

The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility:

(a) CRIMES AGAINST PEACE: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;

(b) WAR CRIMES: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;

(c) CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The following quote from Article 6 is particularly relevant:

Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.

The Nuremberg principles are a set of guidelines, established by the International Law Commission of the United Nations, to undergird the legal principles of the Nuremberg trials. These principles clearly state that any person charged with a war crime has the right to a fair trial, but if a person committed such a crime while performing their duties as head of state or a government official, such a position does not relieve them of their responsibility under international law.

The Assad regime

The Assad regime has unleashed terrifying violence to suppress an uprising by the Syrian people, particularly in the city of Homs. The Ba’athist regime in Syria is guilty of torturing dissidents, imposing itself in power by force. The elder Assad, Hafez, carried out a coup d’etat in 1970, and his son, Bashar, has continued to rule a police state. Syrian Baathism, which started out back in the 1940s as an ideology that articulated Arab nationalism and semi-socialist independence for all the Arab states, has deteriorated into a tyranny that has no problems making it accommodations with US, British, French, Russian imperialist powers. In June 2005, at the Tenth Regional Ba’ath Party conference, the party adopted a new economic approach it calls a ‘social market economy’, trying to balance the public system while introducing more privatisations in all areas of the economy. As one expert put it, opening up to private corporations “is destroying the daily life of the Syrian people.” While Ba’athism supports state ownership of the major branches of the economy, it is opposed to the confiscation of private property, and has actively cultivated the growth of private business in the countries it ruled (in Iraq until the March 2003 US invasion, and Syria until today).

The Ba’athist party, advocating Arab nationalism, was established by Michel Aflaq. Born in Damascus, Aflaq was a sociologist and philosopher who elaborated a vision of pan-Arab nationalism, intending to revive the Arab nationality through a renaissance of Arab culture and education. Ba’athism is officially secular, but has accommodated the Islamic beliefs of the Arab people.

An Arab-centric ideology, Ba’athism rejects Communism as atheistic and inapplicable to the conditions of the Arab world. Aflaq himself was a Christian, but supported Islam and viewed the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as fully compatible with an Arab socialist outlook. The Syrian Ba’athist party has been in power since 1963. The faction led by Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970 and ruled until his death in office in 2000. The son, Bashar, has continued his father’s legacy.

The Syrian regime has committed horrendous crimes – against the Palestinians. In the mid-1970s during the Lebanese civil war, the Syrian army intervened to slaughter thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians to ensure the ascendancy of pro-Syrian factions in any post-civil war political arrangement in that country. Palestinians who opposed the domination of Syria were killed, and the Syrian army actively assisted rightwing extremist Lebanese groups in besieging Palestinian refugee camps. Until today, no-one has brought the Syrian leaders to trial for their responsibility in these killings of Palestinians.

War crimes hypocrisy

In November 2011, a Malaysian tribunal basing itself on the principles of the Nuremberg trials convicted former US President George W Bush, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, of war crimes for their attack on Iraq in March 2003. As the Common Dreams web site reported:

Last November, for instance, a War Crimes Tribunal in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia convicted both Bush and former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair of “crimes against peace.”  The verdict concluded that “Weapons investigators had established that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was also not posing any threat to any nation at the relevant time that was immediate that would have justified any form of pre-emptive strike.”

While this tribunal received scant attention in the American press, it appears that the chief defendant, George W Bush, is aware of the guilt on his conscience. The article continues:

Yet while official America may not take the idea of Americans being charged with war crimes seriously, it’s not absolutely clear that George W. Bush counts himself among that consensus.  In February, 2011, he cancelled a trip to a charity gala in Switzerland for reasons that are disputed.  Event organizers attributed the cancellation to demonstrations planned to protest the alleged torture of U.S.-held detainees during his presidency.  Human rights groups, however, thought the cause was their announced intention to file an official criminal complaint against him with Swiss prosecutors upon his arrival (along with the call for his arrest by a right-wing member of the Swiss parliament.)  A Bush spokesman declined comment at the time, but in a later story about Amnesty International’s call for his arrest during an upcoming visit to Africa, CBS News attributed the Switzerland cancellation to “fears that he may have faced legal action there.”

The elephant in the room

By the standards elaborated by international law, the US government of Obama and Clinton must be indicted for war crimes. The Socialist Worker reported back in March 2011 that US soldiers in Afghanistan, for instance, are torturing, mutilating and killing Afghan civilians as part of their war in that country. The soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Army infantry were photographed gloating over the bodies of their victims. While the US military claimed that such incidents are isolated and do not represent the values that motivate the American armed forces, the 5th Stryker Brigade was armed, trained, undergone psychological testing and entrusted with carrying out orders from the highest levels of the US military and political authorities.

In 2011, during the Libyan civil war, NATO forces targeted and completely destroyed the town of Sirte, killing thousands of civilians. The Deccan Chronicle reported that residents fleeing Sirte were furious with NATO, and demanding to know why their home town was being targeted in such a systematic fashion. The article elaborated that:

But many among the thousands of Sirte residents who managed to escape said the biggest danger was not Gaddafi loyalists but the bombs that drop from the sky and the ones the NTC fighters lob into their Mediterranean port city.

John Pilger, the veteran investigative journalist, said that the residents of Sirte are regarded as ‘unworthy victims’, and therefore expendable. This bombing alone constitutes a war crime for which the responsible parties – Obama, Clinton and NATO commanders – should be indicted on charges under international law. The NATO bombing of Sirte can be compared to the German bombing of the town of Guernica during World War Two. The bombing of Guernica was intended as a demonstration of German imperial might. Today’s imperial powers demonstrated their terrible ferocity in Sirte.

There was a town in Iraq called Fallujah. As the US occupation of Iraq continued and the insurgency gained in strength, the US government decided to make an example of that city, and unleashed a massive offensive in November 2004. All infrastructure in that city, and the civilian population, were targeted by American forces. The entire city became a killing zone, and even the hospitals in the town were attacked. US marines boasted of their technique of ‘dead-checking’; when entering a room of wounded people, they would determine if anyone was still living by pressing their boots on the eyes of their victims. If the person moved, they were immediately shot.

The attack on Fallujah, while carried out under the Bush-Cheney administration, had the full support of the American Democrat party, the party of Obama and Clinton. No-one has ever been brought up on charges for that massacre. This was an act of collective punishment, an act of retribution because the people of Fallujah resisted the depredations of US imperial forces. Collective punishment is actually defined as a war crime under international law.

Two approaches

Back in 2008, the Georgian government, armed and supported by the United States, waged a short war on the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. The Russian military, having supported South Ossetia, quickly intervened and defeated the Georgian troops. Then Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, issued a statement responding to the crisis. While pointing out that the Georgian government had repeatedly violated international law in contravention to the United Nations, Medvedev explained there was no reason why all the relevant parties could not resolve this dispute on the basis of international law. He explained that the current “provisions of the U.N. Charter, the 1970 Declaration on the Principles of International Law Governing Friendly Relations Between States, the C.S.C.E. Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and other fundamental international instruments” provide a solid, relevant and just basis for resolving this dispute between all the parties involved. Medvedev demonstrated to the international community that, even in a time of military conflict, he is willing to respect and implement international law.

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace prize back in 2009. During his acceptance speech, he elaborated his vision of a peaceful world – the US has the right to launch ‘preemptive strikes’ against those forces that threaten its interests. Invoking the concept of ‘evil in the world’, just like his predecessor George W Bush, Obama outlined his intention to wage unilateral war against any regime or force that Washington deems to be an ‘outlaw’. Obama assured his listeners that the United States did not intend to impose itself by force – heavens no – but because the US is motivated by ‘enlightened self-interest’ to propagate its values around the world. His speech, while more subtle and refined than the speeches of his predecessor, was no less effusive in its praise of US militarism. In one speech, Obama rejected the entire basis of the Nuremberg tribunals, advocating the illegal doctrine of ‘preemptive war’, and repudiated the foundations of international law since the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials.

The outlaw in the world today is the Obama administration. We would do well to hold their government officials to account in the dock.

The SunHerald newspaper, located in south Mississippi, carried a small story recently that has far-reaching implications for the capitalist economy and democratic rights. The multinational corporation Northrop Grumman, manufacturer of aerospace and military equipment, opened a new centre in Mississippi devoted to the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), popularly known as drones. The SunHerald article was gushing over the vast commercial and investment opportunities for Mississippi, and stated that spending on UAVs is estimated to increase over the next decade from $5.9 billion annually to $11.2 billion. The article focused on the opportunities for corporate profits, ignoring the terrible human toll that UAVs have taken during the US imperial wars abroad.

Drones are becoming well-known as instruments of warfare, and the Obama administration has expanded their use dramatically. While UAVs are primarily used in the US military conflicts overseas, their use for civilian purposes, such as monitoring US borders, the surveillance large tracts of real estate, surveying people and wildlife from the sky, and a host of other commercial and law enforcement purposes.

Unmanned aircraft have become a weapon of choice for the Obama administration. Their use in US imperial wars predates the Obama era, having been used first in 1995 in Bosnia. Remotely piloted aircraft were used by the Bush-Cheney regime in their invasion of Iraq in 2003. Predator drones have flown surveillance missions, gathering information about targets on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US military began to use armed pilotless aircraft soon after 2003, and have been using them with devastating effect in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and now over the skies of Iran and Syria.The Israelis have used both unarmed and armed drones in their various wars in Lebanon.

Drones are equipped with state-of-the-art computer technology, such as infrared and live video cameras, heat sensors and radar. They can upload vast amounts of data, even eavesdrop on electronic media, wi-fi networks and mobile phone conversations. While the reconnaissance capability of the drones is vital, they can be armed with Hellfire missiles and have rained down lethal force on their victims.

They are the feature weapon in covert wars the US has conducted in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and other countries. Since the Bush-Cheney regime resorted to open, conventional warfare that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties, Obama the ‘anti-war’ president, has increased the use of UAVs as a form of covert warfare. Obama did order and carry out the assassination of US-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The latter was a radical Islamic cleric who was never charged with any crime, or brought before any court of law. Awlaki was killed in a Predator drone strike.

Awlaki preached an extremist, hateful brand of Islam, we were told by media outlets. If preaching hateful religious rhetoric is an offense punishable by death, one wonders why Obama has not dealt with other vitriolic religious demagogues in the United States, whose homophobic and hate-filled rants reach millions of listeners –  like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell Junior, Jim Bakker, John Haggee and Jimmy Swaggart in similarly stern fashion.

US imperial wars expanded

Obama has expanded the Afghanistan war into Pakistan through the method of drone strikes. Pakistani civilians have been bearing the brunt of this aerial warfare, and Obama only publicly acknowledged such warfare in Pakistan earlier this year. The Afghanistan war, while started by Bush-Cheney regime, has now escalated into the ‘Af-Pak’ conflict thanks to the Obama presidency. The terror drones – because that is what they are – have also claimed the lives of those other dangerous people – rescue workers and attendees at funerals. Such killings of civilians have been occurring since May 2009, according to a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. At least 2413 civilians have been killed in Pakistan so far because of drone strikes. These atrocities are emblematic of the Obama era of covert warfare.

Drone warfare has been going on in Somalia at least since June 2011. In a country racked by political instability, economic breakdown and lawlessness, drone strikes are the last thing that will bring a stable, unified, democratic society. But the aim of the Obama administration is not to implement meaningful democratic changes, but to expand the reach of US military and economic interests. The US has been conducting covert military operations in Somalia since 2001, but drone warfare has increased civilian casualties, radicalising a whole new layer of people turning them into potential recruits for extremist groups.

Journalists are increasingly bringing the issues of unmanned drones to the attention of the public. Even that exemplar of journalistic integrity, Fox News, pointed out that Obama authorised the use of armed drones in Libya in April 2011. Obama had been at great pains to emphasize that the United States took a ‘back seat’ in that conflict. The initial rationale for NATO intervention in Libya was that of humanitarian intervention, the establishment of a ‘no-fly zone’ and the safety of Libyan civilians under threat from former leader Qadhafi’s forces. Then Defence Secretary Robert Gates rejected suggestions that authorising drone warfare was a form of mission creep – a stealthy expansion of war aims from the initially stated justification. The ‘humanitarian’ rationale was exposed as a complete lie when NATO forces, using their aerial warfare capabilities, carried out the wholesale destruction of the town of Sirte, an act of collective punishment that resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians. The senior political analyst for Al Jazeera, Marwan Bishara, wrote that the initial justification for NATO intervention in Libya turned out to be false.

Expansion of drones into the United States

In mid-February 2012, Obama signed the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) Modernization and Reform Act (2012) preparing the way for the use of UAVs in the United States itself. The Minneapolis-based Star Tribune carried a story warning that US citizens should get ready for US drone flights in their home territory. While the bill’s passage was couched in terms of upgrading the air traffic technology in the country, this bill paves the way for a robust expansion of a police state in the United States. Drones will now be used to conduct high-tech surveillance of the population, collect information about their movements, monitor any individuals or groups that are of interest to law enforcement authorities, and can intercept electronic communications. Multinational corporations like Northrup Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, all lobbied heavily for the passage of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organisation of activists, lawyers, political analysts and concerned citizens, is disturbed by the growing impact of electronic media on democratic rights. The EFF filed a lawsuit in January 2012 against the FAA which seeks full disclosure by the FAA about the use of drones for domestic purposes. The EFF noted that the market for unmanned aerial vehicles is rapidly expanding, and more companies are investing in UAV technology. The Teal Group corporation, an aerospace company, published a report in 2011 reviewing the world market, cited by the EFF, which states that the outlook for UAV technology is very positive, and predicts that worldwide UAV research and development expenditures will increase over the next decade from $5.9 billion to $15.1 billion.

George Monbiot, veteran journalist and political commentator stated it plainly in his column that the US drone war is a coward’s war. The more that we can distance ourselves from the immediate, lethal and tragic consequences of warfare through computerised warfare, the less accountable we are and further desensitized to the plight of the victims of imperial wars. Warfare using PlayStation-like technology makes us all avoid any obligation to explain or justify our actions, let alone apologise for the ruinous consequences.

Meanwhile the rest of the US economy….
While the Obama administration and its corporate supporters are hailing the commercial opportunities posed by the UAV industry in the United States, his administration has done nothing to prosecute the Wall Street racketeers and financial parasites that caused the 2008 global financial meltdown. The very people that made billions through financial speculation and wildly inflating finance bubbles, are back making money while the rest of the US economy stagnates. People for instance, like Greg Lippmann, a former trader at Deutsche Bank, has returned, making millions buying up securities that are based on mortgages – the very practice that contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. An article that appeared in the New York Times explains that bonds backed by cheap mortgages are ‘regaining their allure’. The article states that:

The attraction is the price. Some mortgage bonds are so cheap that even in the worst forecasts, with home prices falling as much as 10 percent and foreclosures rising, investors say they can still make money.

Lippmann is just one example of a trader who bought up collaterised debt obligations (CDO)s during the speculative housing bubble, just before it imploded. He started his own hedge fund which speculates on mortgage-backed securities – recreating the conditions that lead to the last crash. So the bankers who swindled billions in the financial sector, and then were bailed out by the US government, are once again in a position to continue their reckless and socially destructive financial practices.

It is hardly surprising that such practices can continue. The position of the Wall Street parasites only demonstrates the utter political bankruptcy of both the Republican and Democrat parties in the US. Obama is ruling to advance the interests of a narrow financial oligarchy. The role of monopoly finance capital, as elaborated by the contributors of Monthly Review, is still apparent in the US. John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology and editor of Monthly Review, wrote back in December 2006 that the US economy has reached the stage of monopoly-finance capitalism, where all sectors of the economy are dominated by giant multinational corporations. His article was included in a volume called ‘The Great Financial Crisis’.

Professor Foster has documented the financialisation of capitalism, which consists of the increasing, and now predominant, mode of economic activity being financial speculation, the sale of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, derivatives – making money out of speculating on making money. Not only are financial bubbles created, but they become whirlpools of speculation, to use the famous phrase by John Maynard Keynes. The beginnings of the financialisation of capitalism can be traced back to the 1970s, when the global capitalist system entered a period of long stagnation. Investment in productive activities has declined precipitously since then, but trading in ‘financial products’ has boomed, especially since the early 1990s.

Rather than invest in productive enterprises, the main economic activity became investing in financial speculation – insurance, stocks and bonds, credit swaps. Back in December 2006, Professor Foster wrote that given the massive growth of financial speculative bubbles, it was not difficult “to envision a meltdown of truly earth-shaking proportions”. But somehow, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 2000s, when asked about how the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s escaped his attention, stated that he ‘did not see it coming’.

The imperial wars of the United States have been redesigned, rather than ended, by the Obama-Clinton regime. Rather than a casino economy based on ever-increasing corporate profits, the enormous wealth of the financial speculators and playgrounds of the wealthy elite need to be expropriated. An economy based on meeting basic human needs is urgently needed.

Back in 1989, Romania was gripped by mass protests, lead by miners, against the corrupt and authoritarian regime of Ceausescu. The protests in Romania were part of the generalised ‘Velvet Revolution’ against the dictatorial, bureaucratised, deformed workers’ states in Eastern Europe. Ceausescu, the last Communist head of state of Romania, headed a regime that was based on nationalised property and government-run industry, but implemented a bureaucratised, distorted form of socialism. While its dictatorial nature was well-known, the regime was the beneficiary of multinational business dealings with the West. Many western transnational corporations and business-people (including Australian Lang Hancock) never stopped concluding deals and conducting trade with that regime. The Queen of England bestowed an award on Ceausescu back in 1978.

Ceausescu’s regime earned the wholehearted cooperation of the wealthy elites of Western Europe. Ceausescu sold Soviet military information to the United States, which resulted in the Romanian dictator being welcomed as a ‘freedom fighter’ by former US President, Jimmy Carter. The former British media tycoon, the late Robert Maxwell, who built his fortune extolling the virtues of the ‘free market’, warmly appreciated the Ceausescu regime’s business-friendly political climate.

The capitalist press in Australia, the media being composed of large transnational corporations, seized the opportunity to denounce the entire socialist project, claiming that it failed to provide for even the most basic needs of the population, condemned the majority to poverty, and backed up these claims with heart-rending images from abandoned orphans in Romania’s villages.

Here we are in 2012, and there have been mass protests against the rampant corruption and inequality implemented by the capitalist parties in Romania. The demonstrations have been lead by workers opposed to the harsh austerity measures demanded by the World Bank, the IMF and the European powers France and Germany. They have been the largest mass protests seen in Romania since 1989. Police and demonstrators clashed in Bucharest, and the Prime Minister, Emil Boc was forced to resign. Unemployment is running at 7.3 percent, and the average wage is €350 a month which is about 500 US dollars. As even the mouthpiece of US capitalism, the New York Times, readily admits:

Romania suffered a sharp reversal of fortune as the global economic crisis worsened and foreign lending tightened up. After the economy grew 7.3 percent in 2008, it shrank a painful 6.6 percent in 2009, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency. The country was forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Union in 2009 for emergency loans totaling $27 billion at the exchange rates at the time.

The Romanian economy faced a serious budget deficit of seven percent back in 2009, and the prescription of the IMF, the European Commission and World Bank was to impose ‘austerity’, meaning further cuts to public expenditure, pensions and public sector wages.

The Romanian secret police under Ceausescu, the Securitate, became synonymous with torture, brutality and state-wide repression. Its activities were shrouded in secrecy until the 1989 ousting of the Ceausescu regime. Surely the new Romania would never descend to such barbaric practices? The location of CIA secret prisons has been confirmed in that country. Former CIA operatives described how detainees were rendered to Romania and tortured in the dungeons of the Office of the National Register for Secret State Information, abbreviated as Orniss. Extraordinary rendition refers to the kidnapping and extradition of any terrorism suspects to a third-party country, usually a country governed by a regime that practices torture. The prison – code named Bright Light – was just one of a network of secret prisons across Europe.

Remember the abandoned orphans? In 2009, even the Bullshit Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) carried images of starving orphans in Romania’s dilapidated orphanages, lambasting the lack of care and failure of the political establishment to serious address the plight of orphans in that country. Twenty years after the overthrow of Ceausescu, the institutions designed to care for orphans are in a dilapidated, crumbling state, and their meagre resources are overstretched. As the BBC article comments:

The Carpenis institution is just 32km (20 miles) from the capital Bucharest, the heartbeat of the country’s growing economy. In the main squares, neon lights advertise the biggest Western brands; shopping centres are bursting with families spending new money on Christmas gifts. It is a measure of how far Romania has come since the fall of its dictator Nicolai Ceausescu who bankrupted the country. But not everyone has seen change in the last 20 years.

In Bolintin, another village close to the capital, a lone nurse and six helpers take care of more than 100 patients – they are not sure exactly how many. They were wrapped in blankets and thermal jackets to escape the freezing cold.

Political instability brought on by squabbling, ultra-nationalist-chauvinist parties, using patriotism as a diversion to implement strict IMF-regulated privatisation and austerity, have brought the economy to near collapse. In conditions of a deteriorating economy, the ultra-nationalist and racist parties exploit grievances to channel discontent into electoral popularity. In Romania, as with the rest of Eastern Europe, anti-Semitic prejudice is the usual conduit for parliamentary success.

The president, Traian Basecu, has minimised the culpability of Romanian authorities during World War Two for their anti-Semitic measures and pogroms. In an interview in 2011, Basescu stated that he saw nothing wrong with the 1941 decision by Romania’s military government to join Nazi Germany and attack the Soviet Union, even though the 1941 attack resulted in the deaths of thousands of Jews and Russians. Marshal Ion Antonescu, Romania’s wartime dictator, enthusiastically joined the Nazi war on the USSR and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Basescu has repeatedly ‘softened’ Antonescu’s image, much to the outrage of Russia and the Jewish community. It appears that anti-Semitic killers have their defenders in high places in Romania.

Romania is today one of the poorest countries in ‘united’ Europe. In November 2011, Austrian authorities instructed their largest three banks to restrict the amounts of cross-border loans to eastern European countries, in particular Romania. The Economist bemoans the ‘free-falling’ Romanian political system and doubts the country’s ability to implement its austerity package.

It is time to question the viability of the neoliberal, capitalist project, and highlight its failure to meet the basic needs of the working people in society. The austerity measures being demanded in Romania are very similar to the cutbacks and reductions in wages being demanded in Greece, Italy and other European countries. When an economic system fails to provide a living for the majority of its people, it is time to ask wide-ranging questions about the ideological dogma that was implemented in Eastern Europe since 1989. The ‘free-market’ fundamentalism of the IMF, the World Bank and the European capitalist states must be rejected because its failures are becoming increasingly obvious by the day. The combativeness of the Romanian workers is a sign of a growing class struggle. In 1989, Ceausescu’s dictatorship fell, and the corporate media were beside themselves with excitement – a new era of prosperity and affluence would begin in Eastern Europe. The capitalist class, shifting the costs of the failing capitalist experiment onto the shoulders of working people, are forcing people to rise up against the capitalist system itself.

Back in October 2011, the Obama administration made a startling announcement – the US government had uncovered a conspiracy initiated by the Iranian government to assassinate officials of the Saudi Arabian government on US soil. Their method of choice? Paying killers from the Mexican drug cartels to carry out killings of the Saudi ambassador to the United States; an operation that would have taken the lives of innocent civilians in the immediate vicinity. According to the US government’s accounts, the culprits were also planning to attack the Israeli embassy in Washington, as well as the Israeli and Saudi embassies in Argentina. The Attorney General of the US, Eric Holder, assured the public that swift action would be taken to catch the perpetrators of this murderous conspiracy, and prevent any loss of life or damage to property.

Here was incontrovertible evidence, so the US administration said, of the murderous intent of the Iranian regime. Another reason why the US war drive against Iran should be welcomed in the court of public opinion. Here was another example of the sinister, evil machinations of the Iranian regime, and the Obama administration’s tireless quest to oppose this evil must be supported. A terrible atrocity was averted by the ever-vigilant US authorities – or perhaps not. Even the corporate-owned press began to cast doubts on the official version of events. The Qods Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite fighting force in Iran, had plotted with failed used-car salesman Iranian-American Mansoor Arbabsiar, to blow up the Saudi embassy in Washington, using paid hitmen from Mexican drug cartels. As veteran commentator Glenn Greenwald stated in an opinion piece written the day after the revelations, “the most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday is to take it seriously enough to analyse it.” Bands of terrifying Mexican drug cartel killers let loose in the United States to kill Saudi Arabian government personnel is something more akin to a Hollywood production than to an actual criminal plot.

The details of the plot become murkier when it is revealed that the plot, such as it is, was agreed between Arbabsiar and a member of the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas, who also just happened to be an undercover agent of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In a convoluted case that is sounding more like entrapment by the minute, the undercover DEA informant and Arbabsiar discussed payment options for the contract killing of the Saudi ambassador. The only evidence that the US Attorney’s office provided was the testimony of the undercover DEA agent. Gareth Porter covers the case in some detail, set in the context of ever-increasing use of entrapment tactics by DEA and Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) officers especially in terrorism-related cases. The FBI has been announcing in recent years that it foiled several terrorist plots – after confirming that the alleged perpetrators were undercover FBI agents targeting the Islamic communities in various cities. Various FBI sting operations have entraped members of the already heavily-surveilled and intimidated Muslim communities in the United States.

But there is one aspect that requires further examination. The US authorities, upon announcing the discovery of this alleged conspiracy, moved determinedly to construct their case, publicise the findings and pursue the alleged culprits. The motivation of the US legal authorities to catch people guilty of serious crimes, especially using financial means to incite terrorism, is beyond reproach – isn’t it? As Glenn Greenwald wrote, the US government made clear their determination to hold those responsible to account. So the US federal agencies pursue those who would conspire to commit murder, especially cracking down on the Mexican drug cartels, known for their violence and reckless disregard for human life, right?

Well that is interesting, because back in April 2011, six months before the Iran bomb plot, Ed Vulliamy ran a story in The Observer newspaper (republished in the Guardian in Britain) detailing how the murderous Mexican drug cartels laundered billions of dollars through a large US bank. When an investigator, Martin Woods, an employee of the US bank, raised this issue to the proper authorities, he was ignored, his evidence sidelined, and his integrity attacked by the highest levels of management of the US bank.

Wachovia, currently absorbed by the Well Fargo bank, had been laundering billions of dollars through various methods – wire transfers, traveler’s cheques and cash shipments. The money was laundered through intermediaries on behalf of Mexican drug cartels, criminal enterprises that make their money through narco-trafficking and maintain their businesses through murder, torture and thuggery. Over a period of 22 months, the DEA, the Internal Revenue Service and other US agencies amassed evidence that Wachovia was the conduit for the drug money handled by the Mexican criminal syndicates. Three hundred and seventy eight billion dollars was funneled through Wachovia to launder the ill-gotten proceeds of the Mexican drug trade.

What is even more surprising is that while criminal charges were brought against the Wachovia bank, the case never saw the light of day. Wachovia had violated the banking regulations systematically through a prolonged period, washing billions of dollars worth of drug money that had been obtained at the cost of lives, and Wachovia simply paid an amount in compensation through the district court in Miami. The condition was that Wachovia had to promise they would not violate banking laws – in other words, simply promise not to do anything naughty again, and the prosecution would be deferred.

Martin Woods, an employee of Wachovia located in London, began to raise concerns about financial irregularities from his London office. The bank’s directors simply ignored the increasing evidence of financial impropriety, and Woods own position in the bank was threatened. Woods was basically hung out to dry for pointing out the failure of his superiors to apply anti-money laundering procedures. In March 2010, the senior vice-president of Wachovia, Douglas Edwards, signed off on a settlement where the bank admitted its role in the money-laundering, but agreed to abide by the law for one year after which the charges would be dropped – the deferred prosecution scenario.

The money laundering case at Wachovia bank raises serious questions about the lack of regulatory governance over the entire financial system. How is it possible for banks to launder billions of dollars with such impunity for so long? Enormous profits from the narco-trafficking industry are based on the suffering, broken lives and misery of millions of drug addicts. Governments have not only become unwilling to apply basic financial regulation when the big banks and multinational firms are wasting billions, but are actively compliant in creating a climate where corporate criminality is encouraged. Monopoly capitalism, arising from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has transformed into monopoly-finance capital, where making money from money is more important and prominent than creating wealth through productive industrial or manufacturing activity. The financialization of capital, as John Bellamy Foster puts it, has created the conditions where dominant finance-capital, owning enormous amounts of financial assets, and leaving the stagnation-afflicted economy to its own devices, is the overwhelming feature of this latest state of decaying, imperialist capitalism.

Even the New York Times, the mouthpiece of the American ruling class, admitted in a recent article that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the main body responsible for investigating corporate criminality, regularly grants legal waivers and exemptions for the largest firms to escape punishment and liability. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America and other leading financial institutions would not have been able to get away with billions in profits and bailouts were it not for the machinations of the SEC to shield bankers and executives from criminal prosecution. The corrupt and incestuous relationship between the large Wall Street firms and the regulatory authorities is all the more reason to support the 99 percent, occupy wall street, and sweep away this entire system of criminality that is responsible for the orgy of speculation and graft that makes economic crashes, like the 2008 financial collapse, unavoidable.

The United Nations Convention against Torture (CAT), adopted back in 1984, specifies that no person should be subjected to any kind of torture, cruel or degrading treatment. This convention follows on from the 1975 adoption of the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Article One of the United Nations Convention Against Torture defines it as the intentional infliction of physical and mental pain for the purpose of obtaining information from a person, or coercing them into confessing to a crime, or forcing them to incriminate a third party to confess to any alleged crime that person may have committed. Such pain and suffering is inflicted with the express knowledge or tacit consent of a person or group acting in a legal and official capacity. Article Two states that there are no exceptional circumstances that may be invoked by any party to justify the application of torture. States of emergency, civil unrest, warfare and so on cannot be used as pretexts to legitimise the use of torture.

Each government is required to provide training of their law enforcement officials to eliminate the use of torture, to identify any cases of torture and report them to the proper authorities. The survivors of torture can take legal action against their torturers, and shall be entitled to receive compensation for their pain and suffering. No confession extracted through torture shall have any legal merit or standing in a court of law. The last point is specified in Article 15 of the United Nation CAT. The main provisions of the CAT are summarised here.

Qadhafi regime and torture

One of the main charges against the former Libyan regime of Colonel Muammar Qadhafi was the latter’s use of torture against political opponents. That is undoubtedly true. Qadhafi had started his rule of Libya in 1969 as a pan-Arab, Nasserist socialist dedicated to developing his country’s resources, throwing off the influence of foreign corporations, and spreading pan-Arab nationalism to other Arab countries repressed by Western-supported dictatorships, particularly the royalist regimes of the Gulf monarchies. Starting in the early 1990s, Qadhafi embarked on a Sadat-style opening up of the economy to European oil corporations that he had formerly expelled. Qadhafi retreated from Arab nationalism and reoriented to a more pan-African strategy, promoting his version of ‘socialism’ throughout the sub-Saharan countries.

From 2001, Qadhafi joined the so-called ‘war on terror’, and opened up his country to the CIA rendition programme. This involves taking terrorism suspects from the hands of the western intelligence services and imprisoning them. Suspects arrested on the flimsiest pretext were rendered to third-party countries, like Egypt and Libya, where torture was known to have been used. The cooperation of the Qadhafi regime with western intelligence agencies surfaced a few years ago. While detainees were routinely tortured in Libyan prisons, the CIA and MI6 continued to cooperate with such a torture regime. Qadhafi’s army and police were committing their worst crimes while operating in close collaboration with the Western powers.

The people of Libya rose up in defiance of such a tyrannical regime, which had deteriorated from a pan-Arab, semi-socialist regime into a state-populist government with deep ties to the imperialist transnational corporations. Human rights were trampled in the interests of corporate profit. The leaders of Britain, France, Germany and other countries loudly condemned the violence of the Qadhafi regime and pledged their support for the rebels in their efforts to oust the Qadhafi government. While the armed militias of Misrata and Benghazi were fighting Qadhafi, they received logistical support and training from Britain’s elite SAS troops, and British military advisers provided the ‘boots on the ground’ to ensure that any rebel victory could be quickly channeled into a pro-Western direction. The Gulf emirate of Qatar was a key Arab player in organising the rebels militarily and providing them with political and diplomatic support. Qadhafi’s overthrow was said to herald a new era of democracy and freedom, according to Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel.

Torture Libyan style

The medical group Doctors Without Borders has announced it will stop work in Libya, particularly in Misrata, because detainees are being routinely tortured and denied adequate medical care. The group has stated that the current political leaders in Misrata only provide torture victims with medical care so that they can be revived and subjected to further torture and beatings.

Doctors Without Borders has documented prisoner abuse, treating victims of cigarette burns, electric shocks, and renal failure from successive beatings. The National Transitional Council (NTC) is either unwilling or unable to control the armed militias from operating as a law unto themselves. The British government has made some lukewarm, mild criticisms of the Misrata militias, stating that the NTC should live up to the high standards they have set themselves. Libya’s new National Army Security Service (NASS) is the main body responsible for carrying out the torture of detainees. Setting aside the particularly gruesome killing of Qadhafi himself by rebel troops which in itself constitutes a war crime, the former Libyan rebels, who condemned the torture crimes of the former regime, are now behaving no less savagely themselves.

Part of a pattern

The international intervention in Libya to overthrow Qadhafi was waged on the pretext of defeating a tyrannical government that tortured and abused its own people. The current mistreatment of prisoners in the new Libya may be dismissed as just a temporary aberration, an exaction of revenge for eight-long months of heavy and brutal fighting against a regime desperate to hang on to the last. However, evidence has been compiled by Arab human rights organisations that detail the war crimes and abuses carried out by NATO and its associated Libyan proxies during the 2011 war.

An independent civil society mission, composed of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, the International Legal Assistance Consortium and the Arab Organisation for Human Rights, presented their findings in a report that details the casualties of NATO air strikes, the destruction of civilian targets, the coordination of NATO air strikes with rebel offensives on the ground, and the wholesale demolition of  the Qadhafi stronghold of Sirte and its attendant civilian casualties. The authors of the report carried out extensive field investigations throughout Libya’s cities and villages. The mission focused on the racially motivated attacks on the sub-Saharan African population, and documents the forcible mass expulsion of the African community of Tawherga. To add to the current woes of the National Transitional Council, the town of Bani Walid, the last major holdout of the Qadhafi regime, has been retaken by Qadhafi loyalists.

While the United Nations has expressed ‘alarm’ that the National Transitional Council has failed to stop torture in Libya’s prisons, it is doubtful whether the Western powers will do more than just issue banal platitudes about the use of torture in the ‘new’ Libya.  They have always condoned the practice of torture, particularly in developing countries, and the use of torture is now extending to the major capitalist countries. Last year, the Obama administration announced that those officials from the Bush-Cheney regime who ordered and approved the use of torture, would be granted full immunity from any investigation and criminal prosecution.

It is easy to attack the US Republicans, because they openly express their bigotry, hatred and their woeful incompetence is plain for all to see.  One of the previous frontrunners for the Republican party nomination, Herman Cain, demonstrated his terrible ineptness when attempting to answer a simple question about US policy towards Libya, an important issue given the Libyan uprising and subsequent NATO intervention in 2011. Add to that the expression of racist ignorance by Newt Gingrinch who contemptuously called the Palestinians an ‘invented people’, the ‘brain freeze’ of Rick Perry, and the homophobic rantings of Rick Santorum, and it is easy to see that the US Republicans are a pack of floundering buffoons. Sherry Wolf, socialist activist, public speaker and associate editor of the International Socialist Review, said it best when she wrote that this parade of ultra-reactionary Republican dinosaurs proves that in US politics “you could walk into any bar in Brooklyn and find 7 drunks more qualified to run the country.”

It is obvious to any political observer that the US Republicans will cut social expenditure, cut back education, health care and public transportation, all the while increasing funding for the US military-industrial complex. The current speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, Republican from Ohio, is in the pocket of the large tobacco companies, maintains close relations with big tobacco company executives, and has fought for the interests of the tobacco companies in Washington. In other words, the Republicans are backed by very wealthy supporters, and will use their money and connections to roll back any gains made by working people.

Obama and his supporters will highlight the ignorant, reactionary ravings of his opponents to garner support for his reelection campaign. The Obama Democrats will emphasize any difference, however minuscule, to co-opt the electorate and win a second term in office. What is harder to recognise is the role of the US Democrats, particularly under Barack Obama, in continuing the Bush-Cheney policies, whether it be on the issue of civil liberties, challenging the untrammeled greed and pervasive financial corruption of Wall Street, or on the big questions of US wars overseas.

Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony

Back in 1982, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder released a single called ‘Ebony and Ivory.’ It was a corny, superficial song, ostensibly meant to demonstrate that people of different skin colour can and should work together. Noble sentiments, even if it was expressed in a simplistic, juvenile touching sort of way. The lyrics speak of how people of all colours can all live and work together. Subsequent history has proven them to be correct – but not in the way the songwriters intended. The vicious, snarling ‘ivory’ of the Bush-Cheney cabal has been replaced by the smiling, touchy-feely ‘ebony’ Obama. The faces have changed, but the underlying course remains the same.

The Bush-Cheney regime was widely despised by the US working class (and governments overseas) as an administration ruling in the interests of the financial-industrial oligarchy. Its propaganda was exposed as war-mongering, and geared towards provoking confrontations with recalcitrant regimes in developing countries, intended to start expansionist wars and advance US imperial objectives. Growing opposition to these imperialist wars, and the steady erosion of civil liberties and democratic safeguards, prompted a change of tactics by the governing military-industrial-financial complex. Obama dutifully exploited the growing antiwar sentiment, and general revulsion against a narrow cabal that ruled to promote the interests of a super-rich elite to get elected. He made many promises to end wars, stop the indefinite detentions and renditions of suspects, and generally promote socially progressive economic policies domestically.

Now we can see that Obama posed as an antiwar candidate only to coopt the antiwar movement, and he quickly exposed his true colours soon after taking office. The election of Obama was a tactical shift by the US ruling class from open warfare to more covert forms of intervention, including Predator drone strikes, escalating anti-terrorism laws to lock up an ever increasing number of suspects, cracking down on insurgencies by using private security contractors (ie mercenaries), redesigning the Iraqi and Afghani occupations to make them less conspicuous but no less intrusive, and making cosmetic changes to the US economy while promoting the interests of the Wall Street elite. Not only has Obama started more imperialist wars overseas, he has nullified the Nuremberg laws by promoting the doctrine of ‘pre-emptive war’, a doctrine that was considered a war crime at the end of World War Two. He has refined the Bush-era doctrine of ‘regime change’, and he has promoted/coopted internal opposition groups to instigate covert regime change in the targeted countries. When that tactic fails, Obama has employed direct and lethal force.

Attack on civil liberties

Obama, the ‘yes we can’ president, promised a wave of changes after the Bush-Cheney regime was exposed as a corrupt, malignant, war-mongering administration.  Yet, since taking office after the 2008 elections, Obama has escalated the Bush-era attacks on civil liberties. The recently passed National Defence Authorisation Act, signed into law by President Obama in December 2011, contains clauses  1031 and 1032 that empower the US military to indefinitely detain any person – US citizens or otherwise – any person suspected of terrorism offences, or providing support for terrorist groups. This law repeals the fundamental human right of habeas corpus, and provides more scaffolding for an emerging police state structure in the United States. And this act also provides another $662 billion dollars for the US military to continue its predatory wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. Obama has failed to close Guantanamo, and has overseen the construction of another Guantanamo-style secret prison in Bagram airbase, Afghanistan. The courageous journalist Anand Gopal investigated the existence of secret prisons, who stated that “there is a vast complex network of prisons across Afghanistan, mostly situated on US military bases.”

When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, Obama repudiated the international law laid down at Nuremberg more than 60 years ago, by advocating preemptive war. The Nuremberg trials, held in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, established the precedent that heads of state who plan and execute aggressive wars of expansion are guilty of war crimes and crime against humanity. Senior government leaders were held accountable for their decisions that cost the lives of millions of people. The international community expressly repudiated ‘preventive’ war in the context of German imperialism’s drive to establish economic and political domination in Europe. The US ruling class, seeking to dominate vast areas of the globe, escalated its drive to achieve economic supremacy in the early 1990s with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Obama, the allegedly ‘liberal’ Democrat President, extended the policy of establishing US economic hegemony by invoking the outlawed policy of ‘preventive war’. In so many words, aggressive and predatory wars are now an official part of US foreign policy, as elaborated by the fictional ‘anti-war’ President Obama.

The assassination of people overseas – euphemistically called ‘targeted killings’ – is an innovation for which Obama deserves full credit. Killings by unmanned Predator drones have been a characteristic feature of Obama’s administration. Rather than capture Osama Bin Laden and put him on trial, thus demonstrating the evidence of his guilt for all the world to see, Obama deemed it more appropriate to kill him. Bin Laden, a nonentity rendered obsolete by the forward-currents of history in the words of Robert Fisk, was sheltered in Pakistan, a solid US client state. Killing Bin Laden ensured that whatever secrets he had, died with him. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni cleric was assassinated on Obama’s orders back in September 2011. His status as a US citizen, and all the constitutional protections afforded by that status, did not matter to the Obama administration.

Targeted killings were authorised by the Obama administration in February 2010 by then director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis C Blair (retired). Obama knew that Blair had ties to the Indonesian military, a force guilty of serious human rights abuses including mass murder, rape and torture during Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. In 1999, as the Indonesian forces went on a murderous rampage killing thousands of East Timorese, Blair as commander-in-chief of US forces in the Pacific, was ordered to convey to Indonesian general Wiranto to close down the pro-Indonesian militias. Blair meet with Wiranto, but offered further US military assistance to Indonesia. Wiranto continued to direct the militias that were murdering thousands of East Timorese.

The executive branch of government is now judge, jury and executioner. Awlaki was never convicted, or even charged, with any crime. He was accused by the corporate press as a hate-mongering preacher, and that seemed to be enough to condemn him.  Well, the US is renowned for producing hateful preachers – Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, John Hagee – but they are Christian hate-mongers so that is okay.

Yemen, Saudi Arabia and undermining democracy

The killing of Awlaki occurred in Yemen, soon after the return from temporary exile of the Yemeni dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Yemen has been convulsed by a courageous, continuing uprising that began in January 2011. The dictator Saleh has been a solid ally of the United States since he took power in 1978. The anti-regime protests, like similar uprisings throughout the Arab world, have shaken the regime, and the US is seeking a way to engineer an outcome that protects its interests while mollifying the protesters with some concessions. While Saleh has safeguarded US interests in Yemen, and has cooperated wholeheartedly with that other US client regime Saudi Arabia, the US intends that any post-Saleh regime will not harm US interests. The Obama administration has worked to moderate the demands of the protesters, encouraging the Yemeni regime to make cosmetic changes while preserving the main repressive state and economic apparatus intact. Obama is no friend of democracy and human rights in the Middle East, and as if to underscore the point, Obama approved a multi-billion dollar arms deal with the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia. Rather than encourage democratisation and support the brave people who have risen up in the Middle East, Obama has sought to maintain the repressive status quo, make certain limited concessions, and direct any political change towards a social outcome friendly to US interests.

We saw the same realpolitik calculations applied by the United States in the case of the Libyan uprising. Qadhafi’s regime had started as a pan-Arab, semi-socialist project that considerably developed the country’s infrastructure and improved the education and health care of the population. In the 1970s and 1980s Qadhafi provided an Arab Nasserist model of development. From the early 1990s, he began a Sadat-style reversal, opening up the country to pockets of private investment. By the early 2000s, he joined the US ‘war on terror’ and his regime had deteriorated into a Western-friendly dictatorship with ties to big European capital. The uprising that began in early 2011 resembled the similar protests in Tunisia and Egypt. Qadhafi waged a brutal counterinsurgency war to stamp out the rebels. Initially, the US was tepid in its response to the uprising – it was essentially playing a waiting game to see if Qadhafi, whose weapons had been supplied by the West, could defeat the insurgents. After all, the Western powers’ intelligence agencies were cooperating with the Qadhafi regime, the latter a useful ally in the ‘war on terror’.

However, once it became clear that the Qadhafi loyalists could not comprehensively defeat the rebels, the Obama administration moved swiftly to support setting up a ‘no-fly zone’, on the excuse that it was motivated by humanitarian considerations in preventing a genocide of Libyan people. Qadhafi’s counterinsurgency was brutal and savage – no less brutal and savage than the countless counterinsurgency wars launched by the US and its proxies in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries where the US has supported dictatorial regimes in suppressing popular uprisings. NATO intervention in that conflict has meant that any post-Qadhafi regime will be beholden to the interests and needs of big European and American capital. Tariq Ali described it as ‘selective vigilantism’, bombing Libya to install a pro-Western Transitional National Council, while shoring up the despots in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen. As the Socialist Worker magazine explained, the ‘noble aims’ of the West, ‘preventing massacres’ in Libya, is always exposed as a fraud by the greater crimes and atrocities of the imperial powers and their proxies, such as the NATO siege and obliteration of the town of Sirte, and the ethnic-cleansing of black African townships by the rebel forces which amount to crimes against humanity. Just to be clear about the real victors in Libya, the New York Times documented that while profit-making opportunities have receded in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have opened up exponentially in post-Qadhafi Libya.

Fake withdrawal

At the end of 2011, Obama announced that all American combat troops have left Iraq, thus fulfilling a campaign promise of 2008 to end that conflict. But upon closer inspection, that withdrawal was just as fake as the Bush-era ‘Mission Accomplished” theatrics. Not only is the US leaving behind 50 000 residual troops in the country, the largest US embassy in the world happens to be in Baghdad. Hundreds of thousands of private security contractors, ie. mercenaries, will continue to carry out counter-insurgency operations. Remaining American forces in Iraq will be rebranded as ‘advisors’ and ‘trainers’, obscuring their role as an occupying force. Obama exerted tremendous pressure on his proxy in Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to provide legal immunity for all US troops in Iraq. Maliki and the Iraqi government did not provide such a blanket exemption, because that measure would have meant political suicide for the fragile coalition headed by Maliki. With the Iraqis refusing to grant blanket immunity from prosecution, the US had no choice but to stage a withdrawal for public consumption and hide the scale of the US debacle in that country.

Sectarian violence has been incited by the Bush and Obama administrations, in order to divide and rule. 40 000 thousand American troops are stationed at bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, supported by the US air force and navy aircraft carriers – all in close proximity to Iraq. As Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State University of New York Stony Brook, has commented, Obama has reduced the ambitious scope to transform Iraq into an aggressive ally of Israel (an objective inherited from the Bush-Cheney days), but he has redesigned the Iraqi occupation to make it less conspicuous and placate his critics, and pursue the vast oil and natural gas reserves in the country. The US occupation has destroyed a functioning society, ruined the health care, electricity, medical and educational services, and left sectarian enclaves under the control of a US-controlled dictatorship in Baghdad.

Embracing Wall Street

Obama has been accused by his Democrat supporters, like veteran journalist Robert Scheer, of abandoning his electoral base by failing to tackle the predatory criminality of the Wall Street financial elite. However, Obama has consistently advocated the cause of the Wall Street bankers and financial speculators whose corrupt practices led to the global financial crash of 2008. He has done nothing to bring those responsible for that financial ruin to account, and instead has opted to shift the cost of that crisis onto working people. While it is obvious that the US Republicans oppose regulations for the financial sector and intend on continuing the policies of reckless financial speculation, Obama packed his cabinet with Wall Street representatives and economists with strong connections to the Wall Street bankers. Back in 2008, Obama (with agreement from Republican John McCain) gave the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson the authority to supply $700 billion from federal funds in order to bail out the big banks, buying up the worthless mortgage-supported securities thus acquiring the debts accumulated by the private sector. In other words, the private sector can rack up an enormous debt, but the public will be required to foot the bill. In 2008, Obama appointed Mary Schapiro to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Schapiro is a long-term Wall Street insider, and a solid representative of the big investment banks and financial institutions. This demonstrates that Obama is a servant of the financial plutocracy, and is not going to confront the people responsible for the financial crisis.

In September 2010, Obama made it perfectly clear that his government was no enemy of big business. In a speech entitled ‘Investing in America’ given to a CNBC-organised event broadcast by that channel from Washington, Obama dropped all the rhetoric against ‘fat cats’ and openly praised the ‘free market’ as the answer to the country’s economic problems. He talked about ‘partnering with Wall Street’ to revive the economy, and declared that “”In every speech, every interview that I have made, I’ve constantly said what sets America apart, what has made us successful over long term, is we’ve got the most dynamic free-market economy in the world.” A clear statement of an entrepreneur’s fantasy-philosophy.

It is time to occupy wall street, and remove the pretense that the US Democrats represent some kind of labour-friendly alternative. The Occupy movement, having spread to Australia, focuses on the malignant influence of the corporate hierarchy in subverting political democracy. The defence of jobs, health care, education, social services and our democratic rights needs to focus on the immense concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny financial oligarchy. Socialists, activists, and all those concerned about the growing criminality of the US ruling class need to merge with and strengthen the Occupy movement, and reject the danger of falling into the trap of tailing the Democrat party.

Glenn Greenwald has stated that Obama is abandoning the basic principles of the Democrat party, leading the charge to cutback social security, health care, continuing to promote Bush-era policies on indefinite detention, torture of rendition suspects, assassinating US citizens (and others) without any regard for due process, and building secret prisons. It is time to bluntly state that  Obama is a mass murderer and war criminal, and belongs in the dock with Bush and Cheney.

There are rival armed militias, each with a propensity for violence against unarmed civilians, that control different portions of territory. They get word that a huge shipment of money is coming into their turf. The bags of money will be deposited at a location right in the middle of disputed territory. The haul will be transported in due course, so the gangs start fighting each other for influence, determined to oust their rivals and capture the lucrative prize destined for their city. Sounds like a scenario from the American Wild West around the 1880s? Actually, this is Libya in December 2011.

The Guardian reported on December 17 that rival armed gangs are battling for control over the runways at Tripoli airport? Why? Because the United Nations, having recently released £100 billion pounds worth of Libyan assets previously frozen in order to oust the Qadhafi regime, includes an immediate shipment of newly printed currency. Several billion dinars worth of new money is arriving on five cargo planes at Tripoli airport. Whoever seizes control of the airport will be able to impose huge fees to make the newly minted currency available to the National Transitional Council. While the airport at Tripoli is controlled by a militia from Zintan, a town that saw heavy fighting against the Qadhafi loyalist troops, the main rival and ostensibly national army of the National Transitional Council is determined to gain control. Previous attempts to take the airport by the ‘national’ army have been rebuffed, but this consignment of cash is a large, highly remunerative temptation too sweet to resist.

The future does not look promising for Libya; as the Guardian reports,

“the fight to control the airport is part of a far wider battle for political and economic dominance in the new Libya; one that pits the various factions who united to overthrow the Gaddafi regime against each other, as well as remnants of the dictator’s defeated military.”

The battle over the airport is only one aspect of a brewing political battle over the future direction of Libya’s new regime. The National Transitional Council faces mass protests across the country, and can hardly exert its control outside its own base in Benghazi. While there is a ‘national’ army in name, formed back in February 2011 in Benghazi, most of this army is composed of Qadhafi-era generals. The bulk of the Libyan army remained loyal to Qadhafi. The militias in Zintan, Misrata and other cities are able to continue their operations thanks to generous assistance and support from the NATO powers.

In a telling comment from the Guardian article, the National Transitional Council,

“refuses to say who its members are, or even how many there are. Although it appointed a cabinet last month, policy decisions are taken inside what amounts to a black box. Meetings are held in secret, voting records are not published, and decisions are announced by irregular television broadcasts.”

That sounds highly reminiscent of Mussolini’s Italy.

The entire ‘Libyan scramble’ article is well worth reading.

And just to add to the revelations about the character of the National Transitional Council and its rule in Libya; the NTC is now open to hiring mercenaries to enforce its rule over Tripoli and other parts of the country according to the UPI press. To make absolutely clear exactly whom will be protected by any mercenaries (euphemistically labeled security companies), here is the explanatory quote from the UPI article – “The main focus of the security companies is Libya’s oil industry.”

The Washington Post, the highly influential American newspaper, reported that the top US general in Afghanistan predicted that the Taliban would collapse as a viable fighting militia over the next several months, and eventually accept the offer of national reconciliation from the US-supported Afghan government. This confident prediction was backed up by a note of caution; the general warned that the Taliban could still strike. But he was optimistic about the ‘progress’ of the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. There is just one thing to note about this report; this prediction was made in April 2005. This month marks ten years since the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and the Afghan war shows no signs of abating.

Ramzy Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle, remarked that after ten years of attacking impoverished Afghanistan, this war remains repulsive. Rather than making the world safe from terrorism, or crushing the terrorist training camps where the September 11 hijackers were supported (the stated reason for invading Afghanistan), the Afghan war has not only destabilised the region, it has embittered a new generation of young Afghanis against the United States, stoking the fires of anti-American hatred. The US has been fighting there not for the fake liberation of women, but to impose its exclusive military control over a region well-known for its petroleum and energy resources. Malalai Joya, a feminist activist and former parliamentarian in the Afghan National Assembly stated that Australia’s participation in this barbarous war is only making things worse in her country.

Afghanistan is rapidly becoming the host of a permanent US military garrison, with at least 700 US military bases in that country. This programme of building bases is rarely commented upon, but it is the platform on which the US occupation of Afghanistan depends. The base that is most heard about, if at all, is Bagram air field, the site where detainees are routinely tortured and brutalised by American soldiers. The Bagram airbase houses a secret prison, where suspected insurgents, and their families, and anyone unlucky enough to be arrested in the other decade long war, the ‘war on terror’ are detained and tortured. Some two-thirds of the prisoners held there have not been charged with any crime, and corruption in the Afghan police is rampant, the Truth-Out article documents. Bagram is becoming known as the ‘other Guantanamo’, the evil twin of the secret prison in Guantanamo Bay.

The United Nations has documented the systematic abuse and torture of detainees in Afghanistan’s prisons. The fledgling Afghan national army and police are being trained and mentored by US and Canadian troops, and the teachers are passing on their skills to the students. It is interesting to note that when the Soviets were in Afghanistan, propping up the socialist government of the 1980s, one of the main reasons the West cited for opposing the Soviet-backed regime was its (real or alleged) torture and imprisonment of political opponents by the Soviet-trained Afghan secret police.

The US war on Afghanistan, one of the main planks of the so-called ‘war on terror’ has aided the steady erosion of democratic safeguards and civil liberties over the last decade. Even basic legal principles, the right to a fair trial, habeas corpus, have all been violated by both the Bush and Obama administrations. The Bush regime declared that the doctrine of preemptive war would now apply – that means the US state has allocated to itself the right to plan and wage war on any nation or force that it deems hostile to its interests. This is a recipe for unrestricted warfare that was first advocated by the Hitler regime in World War Two; a doctrine outlawed by the subsequent Nuremberg trials. Obama has not only retained this doctrine of preemptive war, but expanded upon it. The ostensibly ‘anti-war’ politician of 2008 has escalated the militarisation of US foreign policy, and that is nowhere more evident than in Afghanistan. In his first two years of office. Obama has dramatically increased the number of unmanned drone strikes, the computerised warfare that is doing so much harm to Afghan civilians. Obama has authorised nearly four times the number of drone strikes in his first term of office than Bush sanctioned during his two terms in office. Obama the former law professor has become Obama the international war criminal and sponsor of state-approved terrorism.

Under this ‘war on terror’ title, Bush and Obama have created and vastly expanded the Department of Homeland Security, the hub of a police state apparatus. This police state structure and mentality is being used against anyone that the US regime deems a threat to its interests. The logical outcome of this martial-law ideology is the US-sanctioned assassination of its citizens abroad, and that is what happened to the American-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The extra-judicial murder of Awlaki, however repugnant his ideology, is the kind of behaviour that demonstrates to the people of the Middle East that the United States is a hypocritical power, professing liberty and respect for the rule of law, while violating liberty and carrying out acts of terrorism.

In 1985, after five or six years of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, Gorbachev began to ask serious questions about the viability of maintaining such a high level of Soviet presence in that country. By that year, the Afghan communist government was still fighting an anti-communist, Islamic fundamentalist insurgency. Rodric Braithwaite, author of the recent book Afgansty: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89, documents the strident debates within the Soviet Communist party’s leadership about whether to continue militarily supporting the Afghan communist regime, or seek some sort of negotiated political solution with the Afghan jihadist insurgency. From the late 1970s, the American government, the CIA and the associated intelligence community, began financing and training Islamist militias, the former landlords and mullahs that had been dispossessed by the Afghan communist government to fight and expel the godless socialists. The Islamic militants, composed of an assortment of warlords, drug traffickers, reactionary mullahs and tribal chiefs, were opposed to the reforms initiated by the socialist government.

Michael Parenti, an American political scientist, elaborated on how the Afghan socialist government, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) undertook extensive reforms in the country, introducing schooling for girls, a literacy campaign, education for women, legalising labour unions and seizing the large landed estates from the minority landlord class and redistributing them among the poor peasants. The Soviets had been assisting the PDPA government in launching agricultural projects, establishing health care clinics, and providing a secular education system. It took repeated requests by the PDPA government to Moscow before the Soviet leadership finally agreed to send in troops in late 1979. These collectivist policies angered the elites in Washington, Islamabad and Riyadh.

There were factional disputes that plagued the PDPA government, and these divisions harmed their cause. There were human rights violations, and the PDPA regime did use force against its opponents. But it also provided a standard of living for its people that has been unmatched by any subsequent Afghan non-communist government. The US sensed the opportunity, and they organised an anti-socialist jihad through their proxies in Islamabad and Riyadh. As Parenti explains “The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself.  Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.”

When the PDPA government finally abandoned Kabul in 1992, the former mujahideen factions began a civil war, fighting among themselves and devastating Kabul and the major cities in the process. The civilian population was terrorised, cities looted and burned, raping and killing Afghan women and girls, and returning the population to a regime of misogyny and servitude. The Islamist guerrillas were from the majority Pashtun ethnic group, and they began a campaign of ethnic cleansing, targeting the minority communities, such as the Hazaras and Tajiks. Heroin production began to escalate soon after the arrival of the main mujahideen factions in Kabul. Out of this cauldron came the ideological progenitors of Al Qaeda. The current US-backed regime of Hamid Karzai, traces its ideological ancestry to the fanatical US-sponsored mujahideen militias of the 1980s. The assembled coalition of tribal chieftains, narco-traffickers, and fundamentalist warlords that comprise the bulk of the Karzai regime do not care one whit about democracy or women’s rights.

Mahmood Mamdani, professor of government at Columbia University and author of the fascinating book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the cold war and the roots of terror documents how the American military-industrial complex financed and supported an anticommunist jihad for political objectives. As the disparate Islamist groups fought each other for control of Afghanistan after 1992, they devastated the country and could not form a politically stable, unified political authority to run the country. The former paymasters in Washington and Islamabad began to cast around for another force that could stabilise the country and effectively govern. As Mamdani explains, the Taliban were born ‘from the agony and the ashes of the war against the Soviet Union.’ A ‘talib‘, or student, studying in a madrassah – a religious school – was a prime recruit for the new army to be raised by Washington and Islamabad for the fundamentalist cause. Throughout the madrassas of Pakistan, religious students were recruited and trained by the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. Many of them were refugees from Afghanistan, longing to return to their homeland. Promoting a Saudi-style purist, misogynist and ultra-reactionary ideology, the Taliban was born with a political mission and religious zeal.

In January 2011, Canadian activist Michael Skinner published a thoughtful article in the Socialist Worker that explains the strong financial and military motivations for the current US war in Afghanistan. After examining the history of foreign interventions in that country, Skinner explains that US policy planners recognise Afghanistan as a crucial bridgehead for confronting the main regional competitors for economic influence, Russia and China. Most of the economic development projects in Afghanistan are geared towards accommodating the influence and investments of private corporations, particularly energy companies. Rather than liberating Afghans, the purpose of this war is to liberate capital. As Skinner observes ‘If nothing else, the Global War on Terror opened Afghanistan for business.’ Back in November-December 2001, Lance Selfa, feature writer for the International Socialist Review, elaborated three basic goals of the US ruling class in Central Asia; projecting US military power into the area, undermining Russian and Chinese competition thus gaining greater access to the Caspian Sea’s vast oil and natural gas reserves, and increasing the US domination of the Middle East. These objectives remain the same until today. Afghanistan is geographically at the crossroads of a region that holds enormous energy resources. Establishing a secure pro-US regime in Afghanistan serves as the launching pad for further US incursions in Central Asia.

Ten years into this war, where are the American politicians with the same courage and foresight that Gorbachev had in his day? Are there American politicians asking the difficult and serious questions about the Afghan war? The one politician who has been asking pointed questions about the US debacle in Afghanistan, Dennis Kucinich, is a lonely voice in the US Congress. His plan to quickly withdraw foreign forces from Afghanistan was strongly rejected and voted down by the ideologically monolithic – ‘bipartisan’ is the euphemism – US congress.

Malalai Joya, the courageous and principled Afghan feminist, has written in her book Raising My Voice that all foreign troops must leave immediately. The warlords must be disarmed and their political rule ended. The US tactics in this war of night-raids, aerial bombardment and bribery of insurgent commanders to defect has only escalated the violence and created a climate of rampant corruption. All countries, the US, Russia, China and others, must cease peddling armaments to the various factions of warlords. It is this constant flow of arms that makes political life in Afghanistan a fatal enterprise. Empowering the democratic-minded and secular parties is the way to combat the influence of fundamentalism.

After ten years of escalating violence and destruction, and with Obama extending the war into Pakistan transforming this war into an ‘Af-Pak’ conflict, it is time to acknowledge that this is an unwinnable war. More than that, it has needlessly destroyed lives and caused untold misery to millions. It is time to mobilise political opposition to this war, and prosecute the war criminal politicians, like Obama, who are responsible for intensifying it.